‘The badge of the outsider’: open access and closed boundaries – discontents
peter.suber's bookmarks 2017-11-25
Summary:
"I mentioned that ASIO [Australian Security Intelligence Organisation] files go through an process known as ‘access examination’ before they’re released to the public. This is the case for all records more than twenty years old, not just the super secret ones. The vast majority of files are simply opened without restriction. Some, including most of the ASIO files, are opened ‘with exceptions’ — pages can be withheld, and text redacted. A few are withheld from the public completely. They have entries in RecordSearch, but you can’t see them — their access status is officially ‘closed’.
But because the metadata about access decisions is available online, we can start to build a picture of what we’re not allowed to see...."